OPORTO, PORTUGAL.- The Portuguese Institute of Photography, The Portuguese Photography Centre, the Cooperativa Árvore, the school Escola Superior de Artes e Design and FNAC, among others, will add an important component to the parallel activities, with a variety of exhibitions, workshops and seminars. In 2001, the canvas was bare and the challenge was clearly an ambitious one. Two years gone since its inauguration, the objectives are no less audacious, and the makeup of this biennial event carries the consistency which the "brushstrokes" of Pable Picasso, Marc Chagall, Juan Miró, George Braque, Vieira da Silva, Paula Rego, Graça Morais, Júlio Resende or Pomar brought to its first edition, to name but a few of the "greats" exhibited. Backstage, the preparations for the 2nd Modern Art Fair are up and running and its date has been scheduled into EXPONOR’s calendar: 15th to 18th May. The Oporto International Fair hasn’t just placed the Porto Arte 2003 canvas on the easel. The palette for the event has meanwhile begun receiving its first colours, or in other words, the first contributions by participants, which will give further consistency to its commercial aspects.
The Portuguese Institute of Photography, The Portuguese Photography Centre (CPF), the Cooperativa Árvore, the school Escola Superior de Artes e Design and FNAC, among other partners have already added their name to the list of institutions willing to augment the parallel activities by organizing a variety of exhibitions, workshops and seminars.
One of these, aimed at collectors and professionals, will examine investment in art and will boast a panel of speakers of both national and international repute. This initiative is planned for the 16th May and will touch upon themes such as "Collecting art - a passion or an investment?", "The art market in Portugal" and "Investing in art during a period of economic crisis".
Anthony Streatfeild (business director at "Christie’s"), Anna Somers Cocks (director of "The Art Newspaper") and Miguel Cabral Moncada (director of "Cabral Moncada Leilões") are a few of the names already confirmed for an initiative which will be chaired by João Fernandes (director of the museum "Museu da fundação de Serralves").
Porto Arte 2003 maintains its composition, with collections from (Portuguese and foreign) institutions and other forms of artistic expression. At a first level, the space arises as an appreciation of the extra-commercial aspect of the event, serving to attract a higher number of visitors. At a second level, EXPONOR also directed its efforts towards spheres of a highly innovative nature not represented in the base modules, as are multimedia and design.
It is within this context that other contributions come to light. CPF, for example, doesn’t lose time in taking a panoramic shot of the program: a meticulous sample of a collection composed by "over 2000 species of historical and aesthetical value, of great interest to the History of national and foreign Photography", not to mention one of the new acquisitions of the institution directed by Teresa Siza, ’Terra Formada’, by Pedro Letria.
The diaphragm of this event will expose a national component - including Helena Almeida, Nuno Félix da Costa, Susana Dinis, José M. Rodrigues, Duarte Belo and António Júlio Duarte - and an international component, with Thomaz Farkas, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Bernard Plossu, Bill Brandt, Hans van der Meer and Koos Breukel.
The starting objective is simple and comprehensive: "The photographic image isn’t just the product of a science, of a diversified technique which we name image, its origin in reality implicitly understood. It’s a three-way image-action: the act of production, the act of its reception and its contemplation or reflection. The photographic image - and those who are seduced by it know this well - is inseparable from its enunciation and implies a subject, a subject making a slow pilgrimage of the exterior and the interior gaze. A subject in progress".
Multimedia will also be there. Among others, the participation of Jorge Varanda is confirmed with the film ’Sem Lugar Nem Data’, to be shown in the fair. This project has been under development since 1994 and has already been the subject of a Plastic Arts exhibition, exhibited at the Museu Nacional de História Natural (national natural history museum), and of an interactive CD-Rom, supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Its latest expression consists of a video, funded by the Ministry of Culture/ICAM, recently selected by the International Art Film Festival, in Italy, in the category of Video Art.
’Sem Lugar Nem Data’ is a 3D animation film that explores the confrontation between computer generated images and the work developed previously by the artist as a traditional painter and sculptor. The starting point of the movie is a plastic arts exhibition, presented at the Museu Nacional de História Natural, recreated as a synthetic image.
For the Oporto International Fair, Porto Arte is "based on a medium-term strategy geared towards going international, investing in an art and culture fair in S. Paulo, using EXPONOR-Brasil for this purpose".